Christopher Chadwick Email & Phone Number

Nottingham, United Kingdom

I have a very diverse role from requirements gathering, BA-functions, managing my own projects to the core mainframe work I have been doing for many years: reusable high-performance and maintainable code, testing, integration, and implementations. This has also included the analysis of complex legacy systems.In addition to my client-sponsored project work, I am working with new connections I have made within the business to develop sensible and robust programming practices.What has been most rewarding, is, sharing my 18-years of mainframe experience with our first intake of trainee programmers for many years.Some of the knowledge I have acquired has been through painful experience but a similar amount from understanding the environment. We now have a fantastic group of people, new to the mainframe, who have a great understanding of Sort, JOINKEYS, and the idiosyncrasies of Cobol and compiler options. The highlight was being nominated for a "spot award" by them in recognition of my efforts.

Leicester, United Kingdom

Development and maintenance of the mainframe Next Directory customer systems, which support the Next website and call centres, with responsibility for the full development life-cycle to transform new business initiatives into systems solutions.

I began solving quirky data-related issues for OS/VS to Enterprise COBOL conversions but soon moved to the team responsible for real-time XML communication with CICS. Here, I started improving the performance and response times of the on-line application code using a program I wrote to extract and analyse CICS SMF data.I subsequently joined a dedicated team for performance analysis and tuning of on-line and batch systems, identifying heavily accessed VSAM data sets for conversion to IAM and streamlining multiple DFSORT / ICETOOL processes into a single process that operated with a single pass of the input data; where possible, redundant Sort operations were replaced with a Merge.During this time, I took ownership of several complex changes to the critical financial update program of the overnight batch system and devised a test strategy that allowed me to quickly and easily deploy my test code to any environment. I automated my solution to allow me perform valid performance testing in the machine white space.My final role required implementing software changes on our mainframe in Buenos Aires, collaborating with colleagues there and global outsourcing partners to ensure timely and error-free installations and file conversions while generating efficient and effective validation techniques to ensure all changes are implemented correctly. Introducing new and more robust processes to allow a quicker adoption of code and streamlining the testing procedure while still finding time to indulge in performance analysis and tuning for colleagues.The lack of a job archiving facility in my current environment has lead me to develop my own automated system using the SDSF API and, recently, the IOF productivity tool.

I had a wide range of roles from code management and job scheduling to performance optimisation of application code, producing technical designs for MasterCard and VISA compliance and development work covering the full development lifecycle - coding, program specifications, unit and system test plans as well as implementations. I was also on call to support the overnight batch systems.

I continued to investigate and provide resolutions for the system anomalies to which I was assigned and further my system knowledge as a result.

After completing the initial training period, I was assigned to the Management Systems division where I received further coaching in order to complete the NVQ Level 2 in Software Creation. Towards the end of this period I joined the MBNA client team investigating queries from their production system.

M255 - Object-Oriented Programming With Java, Computing And It, Grade 3 Pass

A Level 2 module lasting 9 months that I financed myself and completed in my spare time to enhance my programming skills.

Bachelor Of Engineering (Beng), Civil Engineering